Robert Jay Lifton on drone wars

Greg Mitchell interviews pyschiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (born 1926) on drone war and the human effects and risks of the drone technology, Robert Jay Lifton: How, and Why, the Media Have Failed on Drone War The Nation 05/02/2013.

Lifton himself has a two-part column on the topic at the Huffington Post, "10 Reflections on Drones" (Part 1 04/11/2013 and Part 2 04/12/2013).

In the interview, he focuses on how the drone technology is the latest in a line of technological wonders meant to save American lives in war, or at least justified that way:

The media have had difficulty covering this subject and that's partly because it is a revolutionary technology of killing and the media have trouble confronting what it is. There is now a certain amount of discussion of the political and legal side of drones. That's important but not itself fully sufficient. One has to look at why drones are so much depended on and so much an expression of executive power in our use of them. And one does have to raise legal questions about using them against American citizens but also others—especially when the purposes are not tied to war but to assassination.

Yes, some of the more thoughtful media have raised these questions but almost no one has raised the fundamental questions about drones—questions of the mind and technology. And I’m struck by the basic illusion of fighting a war without undergoing casualties. That's at the heart of things. What that means is you don't have to undergo the pain of losing young men and women or the related requirement of insisting that they "did not die in vain." That’s the central image of any war fighting. No one asks whether a drone died in vain when it explodes.

A central problem with this is that once you convince yourself that war can now be quick, easily and relatively painful for Our Side, it starts looking like a far more attractive option than it should.

In his article, Lifton says:

The claim of humane killing is reminiscent of the historical sequence of executions in carrying out the death penalty: from hanging and firing squads, to the guillotine, to electrocution, to the gas chamber, to the lethal injection. Each was introduced as more "humane" than the previous ones; yet with each there have been instances of highly painful and grotesque forms of dying. The dream of ever more humane killing goes hand in hand with advocacy of the death penalty. Psychologically, the more "humane" the method of execution is considered to be, the less it seems like actual killing. But the irreducible truth of killing is that it converts a person into a corpse. Ostensibly humane methods are meant to ease the individual and collective conscience of those who carry out or support the killing. The claim of humanity can thus lead to more killing.

Such compounding of atrocity is often the case with rescue technologies. Consider the development of airpower as a form of more flexible weaponry meant to replace the "senseless slaughter" of trench warfare. In the case of drones, their visual capabilities could seem to overcome the blind vulnerability of soldiers involved in counterinsurgency warfare. New technologies do change war-making but bring to it their own complications, their own forms of atrocity.

What happens when a weapon embraced as a panacea turns out to be a source of grave error? One psychological tendency could be that of embracing the technology ever more strongly in order to deny its fallibility. There could also be an opposite reaction of slowing down the use of the technology. In American society now both things seem to be going on at the same time. There is a report of the military cutting back its allocation for drones because of worries about some of these issues. But there are other reports about increasing military dependence on them, including sea-going and land drones, with an overall projection of making our army, navy and air force increasingly robotic. Whatever the national confusion and uncertainty, drones are likely to become increasingly prominent in the United States and elsewhere, for purposes of war-making and killing.

Tags:

drone wars, robert jay lifton

The "kill team" in Afghanistan

Dixon Osburn addresses a very important incident of war crimes committed by Americans in Afghanistan in Who is Responsible For the Kill Team? Human Right First 05/02/2011. He points to this New York Times Magazine report on the facts of the incident: Luke Mogelson, A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man 04/27/2011. Osburn summarizes it this way:

The "kill team" refers to a group of American soldiers in Kandahar who allegedly murdered unarmed farmers, a mentally disabled civilian and old men for sport, cutting off their fingers and plucking teeth from their heads as trophies after the kill.

That such a kill team could operate points to a serious breakdown of military discipline. How wide it reaches is unknown, at least to the public. Osburn writes:

Crucial questions remain. According to The New York Times, BG Twitty found that “many of the incidents were not reported above platoon level.” That means some were. Which ones? When were they reported? What actions were taken? ...

BG Twitty’s [investigative] report [for the Army] also contains “additional allegations that were never investigated, never prosecuted,” according to The New York Times. One was of an Afghan shot in the back running from the scene of an IED explosion with no evidence that the civilian had done anything wrong. The other was an incident in which soldiers killed three civilians, two with gun shots to the head and the other in the back. The commander for both instances reported the concerns up the chain of command but no investigation was done. There is no indication that BG Twitty has recommended investigating these instances now.

These are not easy matters to discern. Who should be responsible for the murders? Just those who pulled the trigger or commanders who say the enemy must be attacked relentlessly? According to The New York Times, General Petraeus said in a letter to the troops, “We are indeed warriors. We are trained to kill our enemies…. What sets us apart from our enemies in the fight, however, is how we behave.”

Questions remain about how all of those commanders connected to the kill team behaved. What is clear, though, is that the Army must be fully forthcoming about these incidents before the public — American, Afghan and world — can be confident that serious incidents of misconduct are addressed fully. The Army should declassify BG Twitty’s report. Congress should hold hearings. We must demonstrate that no one is above the rule of law. [my emphasis]

Mogelson reports on a sociologist testifying at the court martial of accused members of the "kill team":

Among the witnesses who testified that day was Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes. Mestrovic was allowed to study an internal 500-page inquiry into the Fifth Stryker Brigade’s “command climate,” the purpose of which was to assess whether shortcomings in leadership might be partly to blame for the murders, and to identify any officers who should be held to account. In court, Mestrovic said he was shocked by how dysfunctional the brigade appeared to have been, and he added, "In a dysfunctional unit, we cannot predict who will be the deviant — but we can predict deviance."

I met with Mestrovic later that evening and asked him to elaborate. Before becoming involved in Morlock’s case, he served as an expert witness at trials related to Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad canal killings and Operation Iron Triangle, a case with some similarities to this one, in which American soldiers in Iraq murdered three unarmed noncombatants. He excoriated the tendency of the Army — and the news media — to blame such crimes on "a few bad apples" or a "rogue platoon." Close examination of these events, Mestrovic argued, invariably reveals that the simplistic bad-actor explanation "doesn’t fit the picture." [my emphasis]

Robert Jay Lifton, an expert of wartime atrocities, explained in Conditions of Atrocity The Nation 05/13/2004 (05/31/2004 issue) explains how counterinsurgency wars are particular likely to create "atrocity-producting situation." He wasn't writing specifically about conditions in Afghanistan, but it is also an ugly counterinsurgency conflict:

Both Abu Ghraib and My Lai are examples of what I call an "atrocity-producing situation"--one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities. In Vietnam that structure included "free-fire zones" (areas in which soldiers were encouraged to fire at virtually anyone); "body counts" (with a breakdown in the distinction between combatants and civilians, and competition among commanders for the best statistics); and the emotional state of US soldiers as they struggled with angry grief over buddies killed by invisible adversaries and with a desperate need to identify some "enemy."

The Iraq military environment is quite different from that of Vietnam, but there are some striking parallels. Iraq is also a counterinsurgency war in which US soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment, and in which higher-ranking officers and war planners feel frustrated by the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy. The exaggerated focus on interrogation, including the humiliation of detainees as a "softening-up" process, reflects that frustration. [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, dixon osburn, kill team, robert jay lifton

Another tip of the iceberg in Iraq?

Aaron Mackey of Tuscon's Arizona Daily Star reports on the "friendly fire" deaths in Iraq of Army Spc. Alan McPeek life and Pvt. Matthew Zeimer: Part 1: Chaos, missteps led to soldiers' deaths 02/03/08; Part 2: Questions haunt slain Tucson soldier's family 02/03/08. "Friendly fire" deaths can occur even under the best of circumstances. But incidents like this may well be signs of more far-reaching problems in the armed forces, problems which the Pentagon has largely kept under wraps. The dropping of recruitment standards, the exit of a very high percentage of young officers from the service, indications of serious breakdown in discipline (the practice of torture, careless or deliberate killing of civilians) tend to appear in the news - when they appear at all - as isolated incidents.

Hillary Clinton's phrasing last week caught my attention when she said, in the context of establishing an exit strategy from Iraq as President, that the new administration would be "taking into account all of these contingencies that we're going to have to contend with once we are in charge and once we can get into the Pentagon to figure out what's really there and what's going on. (my emphasis)"

Whatever Clinton meant by the particular phrase, it's very likely that not only in the Pentagon but throughout the federal government, if we have a new Democratic administration in 2009, we're likely to learn about a lot of strange things as "what's really there and what's going on" during the Cheney-Bush administration comes to light. And what we already know if bad enough.

McPeek and Zeimer were killed on 02/02/07 in Ramadi. Mackey summarizes the findings of a 750-page (!) report the Army did on the killings:

They include:

● Allowing an unqualified soldier who had never fired a main tank gun to shoot at what turned out to be McPeek's and Pvt. Matthew Zeimer's position.

● Failing to load enough machine-gun ammo onto both tanks because the soldiers didn't want to open new ammo boxes, which would have required extra paperwork.

● Leaving for the fight without full crews, forcing the tank commanders to move around inside the tank, limiting their ability to focus on the firefight.

● Allowing a tank commander with a documented past of battlefield stress — which had previously relegated him to supply duties — to suit up that night.

● Never resolving miscommunications between soldiers in the tanks and commanders in the outposts under attack, leading tank crews to fire in a different direction from what they had been directed.

The investigation never says fixing the problems would have prevented McPeek's death.

It concludes that the tank crews needed additional training on how to distinguish friend from foe, which they later received.

Although apparently the Army itself didn't officially published the report, Mackey's summary is a reminder of the close-ranks attitude the services have been taking over such events, even in the case of Pat Tillman unconscionably withholding information from Tillmon's family about how he died.

Mackey's summary of the Army findings could be shortened to: stuff happened; nobody's responsible and no problems were found that caused the deaths; the problems have been fixed anyway. But even reading Mackey's account based on the Army's report, the reader has to wonder if we aren't seeing an instance of more widespread problems: personnel with poor judgment; demoralization; eroding command structures; stress producing shoot-first-ask-questions-later responses. For example, Mackey reports:

One tank commander had been assigned to the supply room until a month earlier. He had been in a tank when an RPG killed one soldier and had witnessed several other grisly scenes while in Iraq.

His commander told investigators that he suffered flashbacks and "was kind of a mess" after the incidents.

Commanders had removed the staff sergeant from tank duty to relieve some of his stress, but that morning he was back with the tanks, running a crew he'd never worked with before.

His gunner that night had no formal training on the tank's main gun. He had some experience firing the tank's machine gun, but had never fired a tank shell, in practice or in combat.

He later told investigators: "This was the first and only (main gun) engagement for me in Ramadi, and I was pretty fired up to fire."

The crews loaded into their tanks and prepared to drive toward Eagle's Nest without any briefing or a pre-combat inspection, which was required.

One of the tanks wouldn't start. It had to be jump-started by the other tank before the crews moved slowly toward Eagle's Nest.

This is part of the human face of the McCain escalation, aka, The Surge, over the last year. His account continues, describing the fatal "friendly fire" incident:

The commander of the lead tank, a first lieutenant, asked permission to shoot the main gun.

After clearance, he got ready to fire. But the gunner from the second tank, a specialist who had no training on the tank's main gun, asked if he could shoot instead. He wanted to get into the fight after running out of machine-gun ammo and being "useless," the investigation later detailed.

The lieutenant gave the OK, later telling investigators that he wanted to give the other gunner a chance to shoot before he left Iraq. ...

The tank gunner tried to lock in the building's distance with a targeting laser.

It flashed an error message: Target is too far or too close.

Resetting the equipment, he manually entered 200 meters and fired. (my emphasis)

A 57-page portion of the Army report on the incident, with several passages blacked out, is available at the Arizona Daily Star site. From the Army report's conclusions:

a. (U) The intensity of that morning’s combat, complicated by the degraded three man crews and the AIF positioned directly between the two outposts, caused the temporary loss of situational awareness during the critical moments leading up to the QRF’s one main gun engagement. This engagement, fired by Blue 3 in the early hours of 2 February 2007, was further compounded by the lack of main gun live fire training and minimal other gunnery training afforded the new gunner, as well as the lack of accurate maps, graphics, and fully functioning coaxially mounted machine guns. Finally, the engagement was complicated by the new 3-69 AR RIP/TOA Soldiers on Grant’s roof who were firing east in the direction of the tank section without full situational awareness.

b. (U) The level of combat experienced by 1-1 AD and the combat losses in personnel and materiel over a 14 month period is staggering. During their 12 month, extended to 14 month rotation, the Brigade had more than 600 Soldiers wounded, of which 95 were killed in action and 200 were not returned to duty. They lost 21 M1A1 tanks, over 40 M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 70 up-armored HMMWVs. This type of combat is indicative of how the enemy fought every move made to enhance peace and stability in this hotly contested province of Iraq. This type of intensive fighting dramatically increases the threat to all those participating in it, as well as increasing the risk of fratricide. Nevertheless, there are actions that can mitigate these situations. The following are some recommended actions that if accepted, can help mitigate the possibility of such a tragic event from re-occurring. (my emphasis)

Despite the defensive and even propagandistic tone ("This type of combat is indicative of how the enemy fought every move made to enhance peace and stability"), the level and intensity of combat is a real concern. Many of our soldiers in Iraq are experiencing what Robert Jay Lifton calls an "atrocity-producing situation", which is especially likely to occur with "an occupying force conducting a counterinsurgency war in which there can be neither victory nor clarity of purpose". (Crimes of War: Iraq; 2006) The Cheney-Rummy attempt to conduct the Iraq War with a "light footprint" has increased the incidence of such stresses on US soldiers there.

Tags: alan mcpeek, iraq war, matthew zeimer, robert jay lifton

Juan Cole on terrorist cult dynamics

Juan Cole has a good piece in Salon focusing on explaining what to many people is surprising, that doctors like the ones arrested in connection with the London car bombing plot, would turn to terrorism since they had dedicated their lives to a healing profession, Inside the minds of killer doctors 07/09/07. Cole doesn't use the word "cult". But what he describes are cult dynamics.

He writes, "Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels." Although he's actually referring to religious cult groups that turn to terrorism. French resistence fighters against German occupation in the Second World War who committed terrorist acts like sabotaging bridges may have hated the occupiers of their country. But they didn't necessarily have such an extreme Manichean view of the world generally.

Identification of an enemy is a key element in the process, though as he notes, a cult can make such an identification of an enemy without becoming terrorist:

The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.

And the apocalyptic element is a key one in this cult process that leads to violence against the Outsiders:

But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. ...

Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.

Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana - a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong. (my emphasis)

Robert Jay Lifton in his 2000 book on the Japanese Aum Sinrikyō cult, Destroying the World to Save It, discusses how the Christian Book of Revelation has exerted a particular influence on apocalyptic cult groups, even ones far outside the Christian tradition:

It turns out that Aum was not alone in its fervor to force the end, to try to bathe the world in its own blood for its own good. For the most striking historical examples of forcing the end, it is necessary to turn back nearly a millennium and not to Asia but to medieval Europe. The connecting text spanning contintents and centuries is the Book of Revelation.

The Aum cult made the Book of Revelation one of its favorite text. (Aum is the one terrorist group who has carried out a successful terrorist attack using one of the so-called "weapons of mass destruction", unleashing nerve gas in the Tokyo subway.) Lifton also reminds us that Charles Manson also considered the Book of Revelation one of his key texts (not just the Beatles whimsical, nonsensical song "Helter Skelter"). So did Marshall Herff Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult. Lifton also writes:

For as the historian of religion Elaine Pagels point out, it was early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thinking that gave rise to the idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil for the fate of the world, of a "split cosmology with the 'sons of light' allied with the angels and 'sons of darkness' in league with the power of evil." [Aum cult leader] Asahara's reliance on imagery from the Hebrew and Christian Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, is therefore hardly surprising. That polarization, that "split cosmology," tapped fundamental, death-linked, often amorphous existential fears, which could be readily manipulated by promises of collective spiritual perfection and immortality.

I assume that Pagels wasn't meaning to say that Jewish and Christian thinkers invented the notion out of thin air. Persian Zoroastrianism had a major effect on the origins of Jewish apocalyptic thought.

Lifton is not suggesting that taking the Book of Revelation seriously inevitably leads to such results. Obviously, Christians all over the world consider that book part of their Holy Scripture, and most of them don't become violent cultists. Lifton writes, "Like Asahara, Manson invoked the Book of Revelation and incorporated its details into his paranoid-megalomanic reading of history and the future."

But he does emphasize that with all the myriad sources of material for apocalyptic cult thinking:

Yet, significantly, from medieval times to our own, the Book of Revelation has consistently been a powerful organizing text for apocalyptic dreaming and for the efforts of all varieties of violent cults to "murder death."

Not all Muslim terrorism can be called cultish. But for groups like Al Qaida and its various copycat groups, understanding cult dynamics is important to understanding how they think and operate. Juan Cole has also written about cult-like aspects of the 9/11 group headed by Muhammed Atta in Al-Qaeda’s Doomsday Document and Psychological Manipulation 04/09/2003.

Tags: cults, robert jay lifton, terrorism